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Not Shutting Up

A weekly note about the issues facing journalism and American democracy, from ProPublica’s leadership.


Inside the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy.
Not Shutting Up
By Stephen Engelberg

Welcome to Not Shutting Up, a newsletter from ProPublica’s leadership. You’re receiving this because you’ve supported ProPublica’s journalism; we’re grateful for that, and we hope to give you some context on how our newsroom works. If this email was forwarded to you, you can sign up to receive it here.


We made the decision to push ahead on Father’s Day 2018. Days earlier, Ginger Thompson, a reporter who spent years covering the border and immigration, had obtained a recording of children at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility who had been separated from their parents. You didn’t have to speak Spanish to understand that these kids were utterly terrified.

As we confirmed the authenticity of the recording and prepared our story for publication, unanswerable questions lurked in the back of my mind, as they often do when a reporter comes across a story of this magnitude. The “news” in the recording was obvious — it was the most visceral evidence of what the Donald Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy was doing to children. But as is often the case in investigative reporting, the tape was a very small piece in a much larger mosaic that we understood only in its outlines.

It was clear that child separations were not the work of some rogue official or agency — this was official policy, set in motion by Cabinet-level officials. But did the people in charge really understand the brutality of what they were doing and the chaos that was unfolding in the so-called children’s shelters? Had the policy been approved or initiated by the president himself? It seemed hard for me to imagine that parents with their own children could set out to inflict that level of indelible trauma on babies, toddlers and teenagers as a routine procedure.

The issues reporters and editors choose to pursue are shaped by their backgrounds and personal experiences. As a first-generation American and son of a refugee from Nazi Germany, I’ve spent much of my career covering government-sanctioned misconduct. As I do, I’m drawn to the question of how officials persuade themselves to go along with policies they know are reprehensible. Simply put: What is the moral and personal calculation of someone who decides to follow orders?

In the months that followed Ginger’s scoop, we assembled a team to look more deeply at the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policies. Reporters across the newsroom volunteered to put aside their projects and chase the story. Our work focused on exposing what turned out to be a network of child detention centers, many poorly run by private companies earning outsized fees for providing substandard care. It became increasingly clear that senior officials did indeed approve the procedures in the hopes of deterring family migration.

Another story by Ginger, an interview with a Border Patrol officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he went along because the job paid well — more than $100,000 a year including overtime and holiday pay — and he felt like a cog in a much larger machine that would keep rolling regardless of what he did.

“I’d see kids crying because they want to see their dads, and I couldn’t console them because I had 500 to 600 other kids to watch over and make sure they’re not getting in trouble,” he said. “I couldn’t let them see their fathers because that was against the rules.

“I might not like the rules,” he continued. “I might think that what we’re doing wasn’t the correct way to hold children. But what was I going to do? Walk away? What difference would that make to anyone’s life but mine?”

The questions about the origins of the policy lingered long after the administration announced it had been halted. More than a year later, senior editor Tracy Weber felt the full story of zero tolerance had still not been told. Reporters continued to investigate, and they struggled with the extraordinarily difficult task of prying open the door to Trump’s inner sanctum.

Unbeknownst to us, the Department of Justice’s inspector general was looking into some of the very same questions. Earlier this month, in a story that went largely unnoticed in the onrush of 2020 news, The New York Times revealed some of the key findings of the IG’s draft report. It included some frank exchanges among federal prosecutors tasked with carrying out the policy.

The story discloses both the shock of senior officials charged with implementing the 2017 “pilot program” that led to the larger policy and their ultimate willingness to go forward. During the pilot program, one DOJ prosecutor wrote to a superior: “We have now heard of us taking breastfeeding defendant moms away from their infants. I did not believe this until I looked at the duty log.” (The existence of the pilot program and its dimensions were broken by Lomi Kriel, who was the immigration reporter for The Houston Chronicle and now covers the issue for the ProPublica/Texas Tribune investigative unit.)

Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time, told prosecutors in a conference call that “we need to take children away.” According to a note taken by a participant summarizing Sessions’ rationale for the approach, it was: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in.”

Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, told prosecutors in a subsequent phone call that they should file federal cases for illegal entry against parents regardless of their children’s age. Notes quote him as saying that cases in which prosecutors had declined to charge parents because their children were barely older than infants had been incorrectly handled. (Rosenstein said the IG report got it wrong, saying in a statement that “I never ordered anyone to prosecute a case.” Claims that “I did not care how young the children were or that I ignored concerns about the children’s welfare are unequivocally not true.”)

The report describes a dramatic meeting in May 2018 of senior officials in which Sessions pressed Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen to order border officers to refer all migrant families detained at the border for prosecution. Sessions told the group the aim was to “deter future illegal immigration,” according to notes. “An illegal alien,” he said, “should not get a free pass just because he or she crosses the border illegally with a child.”

The officials voted by a show of hands. Only Nielsen kept her hand down, according to NBC. The next day she relented, signing the memo that set the policy in motion across the Southwest.

Fascinatingly, our recent investigation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention includes a similar scene. A career official, Martin Cetron, categorically refused to sign a public health order that would allow border agents to expel migrants and their families before they could file a claim for asylum. Cetron told colleagues that it was “morally wrong to use a public authority that has never, ever, ever been used this way. It’s to keep Hispanics out of the country. And it’s wrong.” Soon after, the head of the CDC, Robert Redfield, went ahead and signed the order. Cetron was right to be suspicious. As Lomi and Dara Lind subsequently reported, immigration authorities used the order to send migrant children back to their homelands after they tested negative for the virus.

Stories are like infinitely layered onions. The more you report, the more layers you find. Just this week, immigration advocates filed court papers saying there are 545 children separated from their families whose parents have not yet been located. Historians are still learning things about the Lincoln administration. It will doubtless be years if not decades before the full story of the Trump years is told. For me, the question of who stands up, who doesn’t and why remains deeply relevant.

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